Hi everyone

If you here any haven’t read part 1 well you should do that first as this is a continuation of the first few chapters from part 1.

Alright… moving on!

Chapter 4 - Fixing the controls

There was only one issue… hitting players and dodging was simply way to difficult. In first/third person shooters the challenge comes form you limited perspective of only being able to see what in front of you and in top down shooters the challenge comes from a bunch of enemies or other objects to deal with and to dodge.

The problem with this game it that not only do you have to deal with the limited perspective (since the game was third person) but you also had to deal with tank controls making aiming and moving extra difficult. So in the end to game changed from a top down perspective which later lead to me adding the option to play with up to 8 players/AI’s.

One issue I came across was people being able to mashing the shoot button to win. This lead to adding in the ability to charge your shots to give extra speed and range to the bullet as well as extra damage.

Chapter 5 - Messing with colours

As you may know the v1.6 update to Floppy Sports added in a new sport called Paint Hockey in which I messed around with colours, more speficially having different objects change colour. This lead to Colour Cubes being added into this game and the game was now called Colour Tanks.

When creating the Colour Cubes I wanted to have players change colours based on which one they grabbed and use that to combine different colours. Initially I though having different colours being different guns but I realised in long matches all of the players would end up with the same gun from collecting all 3 colours.

This lead to different colours given buffs to the tanks. Initially I knew I wanted red cubes give a damage buff but I wasn’t so sure for blue and green cubes. I first tried making the blue cubes a speed boost but that simple made it more difficult to control so in the end I made it increase the launch force which includes both the range and speed of the bullet.

But even then I was still unsure of what green should do. Maybe something… health related?

Chapter 6 - A way to catch up

Most games have some sort of mechanic to help players catch up in some way. Mascot racing games have Power-Ups, board games have luck and some shooter games had health regeneration.

I decided that in order to make collecting a Colour Cube with a colour that had already been collected useful instead of giving a buff it would give the player a Power-Up. That way people could’t keep getting a buff on top of a buff to become way to overpowered and since the Power-Up you earn is somewhat random it added a sense of luck to the game.

I just needed a way for players with low health to not feel so hopeless and wouldn’t be able to have a chance of catching up and winning. So that led to adding in health regeneration as well as a health regeneration buff to the green cube.

Final Chapter - Keeping things balanced

Now all I had to do was make some minor but important changes to keep the gameplay balanced.

Some of these changes included:

• Deceasing the buff from x2 to x1.5

• Only allowed health regeneration for charging up shoots and then shooting, not from just doing nothing

• Making it so that if you were damaged while charging that the health regained would be reset

• Significantly reduced the amount of health regained (initially the health was regained to quickly leading to very long battles)

• Giving players with lower health a faster health regeneration, while giving players with higher health more slower health regeneration

After those balancing changes along with a few others which I may of forgotten about (mostly related to Power-Ups) I simply added in controller support, AI’s to battle against (with 4 difficulty settings), a bunch of stages to battle on, a nice looking UI, all sorts of gameplay options and a Endless Survival mode mode which lead to v1.0 being released.

If you have any feedback/suggestions on what could be added/changed let me know as if there are enough ideas then I may end up releasing another version after v1.0

Thanks for reading :)